Problems of temporal granularity in robot control: Levels of adaptation and a necessity of self-confidence

Abstract

The granularity of “action” within a system is highly depending on the internal representation for the task, or intention of what to do if it is a biological system. In the same time, there are several levels of adaptation when the system tries to complete a mission. The problem of choosing the right level of action representation is essential for robot controls as well as in learning paradigms. Both tend to use low-granularity and transfer the processed information to upper levels constructively. However the system never guarantees the completion time of the mission if the system is composed of stiff functional blocks with a specific temporal granularity at the bottom level. However, we biological system have an ability to manage the global time for scheduling and reorganization of tasks to finish by the deadline. Brain-inspired robotics allows us to investigate a distributed parallel information system, the brain, with the ability of time management as a real time control system of the physical body through flexible planning of necessary actions by interacting with the real environment. It is an extension of subsumption approaches that fixed a set of behaviors as the basic unit of action in the viewpoint of temporal property. By focusing on the temporal granularity as a consequence of coordination among multiple levels, a self-confident robot control may arise from a coupling between top-down or purpose-oriented decomposition of the purpose to primitive functions with flexible time windows and bottom-up of sensori-motor reactions in dynamic environments.